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True Fictions: New Adventures in Folklore 

(2007) 

by The Light Surgeons is the result of a year long digital performance art project produced and directed by Christopher Thomas Allen and commissioned by EMPAC, New York.

The final piece was completed and presented in September 2007 and has begun touring to festivals internationally.

True Fictions is an audio visual spectacle that fuses documentary film making, music, animation and motion graphics with cutting edge digital performance tools. A stunning collage of music and live cinema which explores the themes of truth and myth through a multitude of American and Native American voices; with a original musical score created through the collaborations of 25 New York based musicians and vocal artists.

 

Source: The Light Surgeons' website

 

 

Recorded and shot in and around Troy, New York, True Fictions: New Adventures in Folklore is an eye-popping performance of epic proportions with projections on multiple over-sized screens that fuse documentary film making, live and electronic music, animation and motion graphics with innovative digital video performance tools.

Taking American folklore as a departure point, the UK-based Light Surgeons tackle the universal question of how our personal, political, and national myths evolve from subjective stories to widely held truths. The artists guide the audience through this terrain with a live collage of documentary footage, interviews and music recorded in Troy and across the rest of the state of NY- from Troy's Uncle Sam's Day Parade to a cramped music studio in Brooklyn to an upstate Native American reservation and more.

 

Source: EMPAC

 

 

True Fictions: New Adventures in Folklore, found footage, architecture, people, Live Visuals

Reading

The Art of Projectionism (2007) by Frederick Baker (in German) sets out the principles behind his use of projectors in the film making process. He defines a projectionist school of filmmaking and media art. In this publication he also presented Ambient film, a surround experience that can be shown in specially developed cinemas. (Wikipedia)

VJam Theory: Collective Writings on Realtime Visual Performance (2008) presents the major concerns of practitioners and theorists of realtime media under the categories of performance, performer and interactors, audiences and participators. The volume is experimental in its attempt to produce a collective theoretical text with a focus on a new criticality based on practitioner/ artist theory in which artist/ practitioners utilise theoretical models to debate their practices. (VJ Theory)

VJing (2010) is a reproduction of the Wikipedia article VJing, based upon the revision of July 25th 2010 and was produced as a physical outcome of the wiki-sprint, a collaborative writing workshop that was held 2010 in the frame of Mapping Festival, Geneva. (Greyscale Press)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Rewind, Play, Fast Forward (2010) – The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video by Henry Keazor, Thorsten Wübbena (eds.) brings together different disciplines as well as journalists, museum curators and gallery owners in order to take a discussion of the past and present of the music video as an opportunity to reflect upon suited methodological approaches to this genre and to allow a glimpse into its future. (transcript Verlag)

Fast & Furious: Web trailer (2009) by Addictive TV. Burning rubber, skids and squealing tyres galore - this movie was made for remixing...! Slamming the pedal-to-the-metal, Vin Diesel and Paul Walker re-team for the ultimate chapter of the movies built on speed. (Addictive TV's YouTube Channel)

Kasumi is a video/sound artist whose interdisciplinary activities have included professional activities as a concert musician, exhibiting painter, published writer, theatrical designer, and film producer. Kasumi is one of the leading innovators of a new art form synthesizing film, sound and video in live performance. She has won global acclaim for her work in venues worldwide: from Lincoln Center with The New York Philharmonic to collaborations with Grandmaster Flash, DJ Spooky and Modeselektor. (Kasumi)

Funkstörung: The Zoo (2004) - Zeitguised's interpretation of The Zoo by Funkstörung is a lighthearted piece that affirmates the facility of synthetic constructions against the heavy, serious notion of established constructions, including CG's own means of photorealism. (Zeitguised)

Coldcut: Natural Rhythm (1997) by Hexstatic is the second part of the Natural Rhythms Trilogy, Stuart Warren-Hill's first experiment in video sampling, the first piece being Frog Jam and the third being the critically acclaimed A/V single Timber, which won the MCM Atlas [French national TV] Award for Best Video Editing (1998). Although Stuart was the main architect of this trilogy, it was created with the support of Coldcut and Greenpeace. (Hexstatic)